Word: woburn
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...Woburn, Mass...
...long, hardly conventional weekend from college, the Aga Khan, Harvard senior, flew to London, stopped at The Cygnet's House finishing school to call for 17-year-old Sylvia Casablancas, daughter of a Mexican businessman. Driving on to Woburn Abbey, the Aga and his possible Begum quietly visited his aunt, the Duchess of Bedford...
After that, snaking through Washington Street came a car caravan with the Mayors of Woburn, Malden, Melrose. Chelsea, Somerville, and Watertown. The procession reached Loew's Orpheum in twenty minutes. They were expected. Huge banners hung across Washington Street, and a bank of gigantic revolving search-lights striped the air white and red. By the time the important guests began to arrive, the crowd was a panting mass of humanity. Police lines were trampled and girls screamed...
When John succeeded to his title in 1953, he and his wife, an aunt of the new Aga Khan, found Woburn Abbey crumbling from neglect. For two years the couple painted and repaired, rummaged through rooms of stored ancestral treasures. The duke stopped at nothing to advertise his place. He snapped up every TV offer, lectured women's clubs on how to cook venison ("Had to study up for that one"), gave his butler's services as a prize on a U.S. TV show, even invited Marilyn Monroe to spend a night in the bed used by Charles...
Helicopters & Nudists. Though he is far from making the annual $420,000 needed to keep Woburn up, the duke plans a motel and trailer park, will stage a tractor race with the Marquess of Bath in July, will even entertain a convention of nudists in August ("Well, why not?"). For those who call such antics undignified, the duke has only scorn: "Try to sell your dignity to a pawnbroker and see how much you get." Besides, he says with a self-satisfied smile, "the people who have been so bloody nasty in the past are now beginning to copy...